Le Cannet

Today I saw for the first time Le Cannet, where Bonnard painted in a particularly productive period. Once a village composed of market gardeners and orchard growers, it is now part of the concrete jungle that has invaded the coast.

Leaving the museum for a rainy day, we went looking for the views that Bonnard painted: aided and abetted by a map offered by the museum. Not the most helpful cartography, but nevertheless we got up to the upper reaches and walked along the canal de la Siagne.

There are some seriously expensive properties up there, protected by barbed wire, dogs with bad tempers, and chaps, who knows, with incurable gun fetiches. The rich are afraid, very afraid. The only drawback to their paranoia was that they tried to cut off the view, too, rendering the footsteps of Bonnard tour slightly pointless.

Still, the heart of the old village is ravishing, and some of the architecture of the surrounding villas, despite the psychoses of those who commissioned it, is of breathtakingly good quality.

Worth the walk, especially for the rare peeks over the security fences towards the Isles de Lérins.

Clichés

Some iconic sights, however clichéd, are still rousing. Our hotel in NY was next to a precinct engine house, replete with firetruck and flashing lights. This one is for Arthur...

Whirr and whizz

Off to the plateau of Calern this morning. Bright sunshine, keen mountain air, the strong scent of lavender and thyme as our sandals passed over the tufts of hardy vegetation.

Hardly a sound, except for the excited warning chirrup of invisible small birds as we approached their hiding places.

Then a strange whirring sound, almost wasp-like. It was the aeromodellers' club, flying their sleek, radio-controlled gliders off the cliff edge. With the wind thrumming across their wings, they flew with almost the same grace as the eagles and buzzards we often see up there.

Resquilhada

The darse at Villefranche


The San Giuseppe about to be robbed of wind


The paella, before the mussels, rice and rabbit

This weekend I swapped the lifeboat for pointus and headed for Villefranche, which was hosting a traditional boat festival. The boat trip there, along the coast, on the good ships Caribe and Virginie, was magic, with Omo-bright white horses flecking an intensely blue sea, and the sunshine picking out all the details of the coast. What was even nicer was to be sharing this with friends, including English newcomers Paul and Lisa, delightful company and good fun, who joined us via the lifeboat funding campaign.

In Villefranche, the welcome was as warm as the sunshine. The lateen sails billowed in the sea breeze (except when the wind was obstructed by giant cruise ships), the rosé flowed in welcome draughts, and the socca, porchetta and paëlla (cooked in front of us by hard-working volunteers) were delicious, and much appreciated after the exertions on the water.

I met quite a lot of friends I had made in Brittany, including the crazy lot from CaraMed, who invited me back to sail with the Catalina any time I wanted. Mind you, they owed it to me, as Vincenzo and I, with two heavy sweeps, rowed all forty something feet, and eight tons, of her into the darse at Villefranche as a taxi service off the other boats. To cap it all, we were played into our berth by a dour Scotsman in Bermuda shorts, playing Scotland the Brave and Flower of Scotland, with repeats (well, it took a long time to wriggle into the space at our disposal, and sweeps aren't the best way of navigating narrow passages).

The other pleasure was meeting lots of Italians, especially the crew of an exquisite sailing gozzo, the San Giuseppe, from Prà, near Genoa. For some strange reason, the skipper of the San Giuseppe was wearing what looked like a magistrate's biretta with regulation pom pom. Inexplicably, incongruously, it was exactly the right kind of headgear for the occasion.

Garoupe Signal Station

No pictures in this post. I was too busy up at the signal station, helping out with doors open day. The queue to get into the observation tower was really long and slow moving, and the coastguards had plenty to do in the normal run of things, let alone the weekend when the public is unleashed amongst their radars, computers and giant binoculars (hint: I wouldn't mind a set for Christmas, but our floors would need to be reinforced to carry the weight). Ideal conditions, then, to do a bit of propaganda on behalf of the lifeboat service.

Our star turn, as it happened, was explaining what was in an inflatable liferaft. We had inflated one just outside the gates, and had displayed the survival gear, including the rations. The kids really liked the emergency rations, particularly the biscuit. I told them they shared their approval with my feathered friends.

Charlie, normally a chap of few words, surprised us all by demonstrating a real talent for sales chat, in French. Boy, did he move a lot of merchandise at the lifeboat stand.

As ever, the coastguards were charming company, and it was nice putting faces to the voices we hear over the radio when out at sea on rescues.

Competitive spirit

The mega-rich know what it takes to get ahead: a ruthless sense of me first! One of them must have been reading my blog, because he (or she) has decided to outdo the view-blocking prowess of the super-yacht "A", by bringing an even bigger one into port, completely filling the horizon. Must be a bugger to park, though...

Aperçu mer...

One of the things that intrigue me about French mores is the lack of salesmanship in selling houses. Photos invariably focus upon squalid piles of ironing, or decaying junk in the backyard. A similar insouciance is only too apparent in the accompanying blurbs, where hackneyed phrases succeed one another with dismaying regularity.

Of these feeble formulae, one is regarded as a particular selling point: "aperçu mer", or sea view. Usually one would need a neck with the length of a giraffe's and the 360° flexibility of a common pigeon's to glimpse the pollution-hazed postage stamp of blue, kilometres away behind the concrete jungle.

In our case, however, there is an "aperçu mer" (and indeed an "aperçu montagne"). And what is more, no buildings can be built to block them. But I speak too soon. In the last few days, various, very large objects have blocked the view.

The first is the motoryacht "A" (comes even before "Aardvark", in superyacht listings, geddit?). To give you an idea of scale, that's a full-sized lighthouse in front of it, just below the silvery funnels.

The other is a massive crane, which waddled into position the day before yesterday, in preparation for two years of noise and dust, as they build an underground (underwater?) carpark next to the port, just on the other side of the ramparts.